Umbraco 4.10 To Be Released Soon

01st October 2012 Roger Davies

We like to keep all our customers, followers and fellow Umbracians up to date on what we can expect to see in the new and upcoming versions of Umbraco. Version 4.9 was recently released and already we can look forward to Umbraco 4.10 being released fairly soon. It was scheduled for this Friday, but this has been moved to allow for more testing and debugging. So just what will it mean for end users and developers?

Anyone (like ourselves!) who tried the Umbraco 4.9 will have initially experienced a few minor headaches such as the XSLT editor not quite behaving, along with some additional new functionality that has been added. But what new features will we see in this upcoming instalment?

New to umbraco 4.10!

MVC support

One of the biggest advantages of Umbraco 4.10 is that it will come with MVC support, which will give developers more options. The Model view controller (MVC) pattern is an alternative technology to masterpages which can be used in ASP.NET web applications. While this may not mean a lot to the end user, I suspect it will make many Umbraco developers happy! It will make it easier for a site that already uses MVC to move over to Umbraco (this includes any websites built with Umbraco 5, which has now been discontinued). There will be an editor specifically for MVC pages in addition to the existing editor for Masterpage. Other MVC enhancements will allow the hijacking of routes to give the developer complete control of the URL handling through MVC. It will also be possible to render all macros in an MVC form, and this includes both XSLT and Razor.

Changes to media interface

As of 4.10, your media section will have a drag and drop feature for images and other content that will allow you to organise and move media around much more effectively. You will also be able to give a specific URL to any of your media (much neater if you decide to share this media with anyone).

Document type enhancements

The document types are due for quite an overhaul that will make organising and sorting both document types, and properties much more manageable. It will allow for the grouping of fields to make the admin panel easier to ready (as shown below), document types can now be sorted, and the default sub-document types can be set. This version will also provide the 'mixins' functionality (previously available as a package) - which will allow you to create your own, more abstract document type and apply all the properties it contains to chosen documents within the tree, making common properties easy to manage and set for groups of document types.

Other changes

There will be some other changes that will improve security and usability - for instance, you will be required to enter the current password before being allowed to reset to a new password. Standard document type properties will be prefixed with @ sign.

All of this will not only add features and make Umbraco more easy to use, but give will developers more choice on how to implement a website - and this has to be a good thing for everyone. Will it be a success? Only time will tell. We can expect to see more changes in future, you can browse the Umbraco Roadmap for more details of what to expect. Follow us and keep on top of the latest Umbraco development news. If you are interested in getting Umbraco for your website, why not contact Simon Antony, certified Umbraco developers at hello@simonantony.co.uk or give us a call on 0161 443 4150.